


life goes on (if you're one of the lucky ones)

by fernybranca



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Discussion of Abortion, F/M, Marriage, Post-Canon Fix-It, Unplanned Pregnancy, discussion of suicide, ffs we deserve a happy ending, if this were a romance novel it'd be classified as 'reconciliation romance', not exactly a forced marriage but everyone feels it's obligatory so
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-22
Updated: 2019-06-08
Packaged: 2020-03-09 15:50:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 15,638
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18920161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fernybranca/pseuds/fernybranca
Summary: Neither Jaime nor Brienne thought they would live through the wars. When they do, they're both left with the consequences of their actions—and the hard truth that they are no longer the people they once believed themselves to be. And there's a child to think of. Post-series canon-divergent fic. (UNLIKELY TO BE FINISHED - SORRY)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dreadwulf](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dreadwulf/gifts).



Brienne knew that if she prayed to the Seven, her prayers would be answered. They always had been.

She had told Renly that, once, when he had idly wondered what else he might do to turn his brother’s heart and turn the tide of battle. He had not really been asking her. He had been asking the empty air of his tent. She was no more than an ornamental suit of armor to him in that moment. She had answered nonetheless. “Pray,” she had said, and looked sidelong to see his beautiful face twist.

“Has it done you any good, Beauty?” he’d scoffed. It was the only time he had used the nickname.

Brienne could not deny that the Seven did not give you what you asked for. They had not stopped her growth when she threatened to overtop her father; they had not cleared the freckles from her skin; they had not made her nose set straight the first time it was broken, nor any of the other times after that. They had not given her a golden tongue, and they had not sent her a dressmaker who understood that the muscles around her back could not simply be confined with creaking corsetry. They had not made her a lady.

They had sent her something better, purer: they had sent her a knight’s soul and a body to do a knight’s work, and had sent her Renly to remind her that not all men were cruel, and had sent her victory in the melee at Bitterbridge so that she might not ever have to leave him. Even when Renly had been killed, they had sent her Catelyn Stark to teach her that women might have honor also, and Sansa Stark to teach her that society was not composed purely of knights and ladies but of people with both natures mixed, and Arya Stark to teach her that she was not the only woman who fought with swords. And they had sent her Jaime Lannister.

It was with reference to Jaime Lannister that she prayed now. He had taught her to give up asking for any particular thing, had taught her that it was impossible to impose one’s will on the gods. So her prayer was contentless. She did not even specify which of the Seven she prayed to. Her only icon was a prism and the rainbow it created.

She could not specify which of the Seven she prayed to, for she had put herself outside any one of their purviews. A knight she was, and pledged to the Warrior; unmarried, and the rightful province of the Maiden; yet she had missed her courses and she knew certainly and surely that she would soon catch the Mother’s particular interest.

* * *

Jaime should have dreamed of pressure, of the weight of the Red Keep pushing the air from his lungs, of the weight of his choices crushing him into pulp, like a sack of grapes crushed into wine. He should have dreamed of his wasted muscles pressed flat, his bones broken and ground into dust, his precious Lannister blood streaming from his nose and mouth. He should have dreamed of Cersei pressed and ground and mixed with him, one flesh, finally—themselves and their child, all turned into nothing but meat, and entombed beneath a pile of rock, with the damned Iron Throne melted down with dragonfire to crown the lot.

Jaime did not dream of pressure. He experienced only blackness. For once he was free. He was not even himself. He answered to no one for his choices, his passions, his circumstances. It was bliss.

Then, unfortunately, he woke up.

* * *

“Sire,” Brienne said, “I regret that I cannot accept the honor. You shall have to find another Lord Commander for your Kingsguard. —Lady Commander.”

“Then you’ll stay with me in the North,” Sansa said—Queen Sansa. “I know you miss Tarth, but I’m glad.”

King Bran the Broken’s eyes always seemed to be staring into the distance, seeing things far away; but today, here, in the only room of the Red Keep that had escaped utter destruction, he seemed especially abstracted. “No, Sansa,” he said, “because of the babe,” as though he were merely alluding to a simple and well-known fact.

Sansa could not stifle her indrawn breath. Brienne did not need to look up from where she knelt to imagine her sworn lady’s shocked face.

“Because of the babe,” Brienne replied, her voice low and as steady as she could make it.

“The oath says that members of the Kingsguard will _father_ no children,” Bran observed. “It says nothing about mothering.”

“The letter of the law,” Brienne said, her eyes still carefully cast down, “not the spirit.”

“And you will not drink moon tea?” Sansa asked. Brienne did look up at that. In her own way Sansa could be as abstracted as Bran, as cold and calculating as Littlefinger had been, as pitiless as Daenerys Targaryen. Sansa would counsel her to drink the tea, if Brienne asked for advice.

“No, my lady.”

“She wouldn’t,” Bran said, “for the child might be the last thing she has of Jaime Lannister.”

Brienne felt her face turn red. She could not work out whether it was with anger or embarrassment or both. She had never been good at examining her feelings, even when they were simple feelings. She was grateful that there was no-one present but Bran and Sansa, but it was too much to even share this with them, her sworn lady and her King.

Bran did not care how she felt. He cared only what she would do. “He will survive his wounds, you know.”

“You can see the future, then?” she asked.

“Sometimes.”

“What will you do with him?”

“What you want me to do.”

“If you won’t drink moon tea, the child must have a name,” Sansa said, obviously wishing to discuss anything but Jaime Lannister’s fate. “Gendry’s your liege-lord in the Stormlands; he’ll ratify the babe a Tarth, and make it your heir.”

“That won’t serve,” Bran said. “There must be an heir to Casterly Rock.”

“Tyrion,” Sansa shot back.

“My Hand will be busy in the Crownlands.”

“Janei Lannister.”

“A young girl, to be married to whom?”

“You said the Kingslayer would live,” Brienne interrupted. “Surely he is the heir.”

“I said he would survive his wounds,” Bran told her, face as placid as ever. “I know not whether he will live. He may put an end to himself. He tried to save his sister. He failed.”

It felt as though someone had cracked an egg on Brienne’s head: a short sharp shock, a crunch, and then the slimy feeling of truth, the disgusting truth. Until the moment that her illusions were ripped away, she had not known that she had been cherishing other possibilities—that he had gone to put a dagger in Cersei’s heart, that he had gone to right the wrongs he had made.

But Jaime would never do that. Jaime might betray Cersei, the other half of his soul, but he would never leave her for long. In his own twisted way he was a truer knight than any.

Tears pricked at Brienne’s eyes. The misery enveloped her. Something deep inside her chest tightened and tightened, iron bands around her heart. As though from a long way away, she heard her own voice saying, “He failed, and Cersei is dead, along with the babe she carried. I am alive, and our child with me. He will do as I bid.” It was a hateful statement. But she did hate him, a little, for being so noble and so devoted to someone else. For choosing his past over his future. She did not know what else she felt. She felt so much.

“You would compel him to marry you?” Sansa asked.

“I would, my lady,” Brienne said.

“I didn’t think you had it in you.”

Brienne stood, feeling the subtle changes in her body: the babe was barely a reality and yet it had already altered her balance, her whole way of being in the world. “I didn’t, before,” she said. “Now I do.”

* * *

The room in which the Silent Sisters tended Jaime was whitewashed and, as far as he could see, utterly barren. He could not see much of it because he could not move much. It was not clear if he would someday get up from his bed, or if he would be like Brandon Stark in his chair. It is hard to predict such things when someone’s arms and legs and feet are all broken in multiple places.

At first he thought that perhaps he was dead, that the pain in his body and the stillness of the room and the veiled sisters were all part of the torments that septons say are visited upon the souls of the evil. It seemed reasonable that the Silent Sisters, who prepared the dead for the world to come, would be the castellans of the afterlife. It hurt even to breathe; he had suffered broken ribs before but never such a piercing, unremitting pleurisy. He thought that perhaps a rib had pierced a lung, and that he would one day cough up infection and die. They would not give him milk of the poppy for fear that he would fall into coma once more.

He realized slowly that if he thought he would die, he could not be dead already.

Then his brother Tyrion came to see him. Tyrion could not be dead: Tyrion would outlive them all. A dragon could breathe fire on Tyrion, and he would come up with some miraculous way to shield himself, and then offer a witty comeback. The dragon would eat Tyrion, and then vomit him back up as indigestible.

“You truly fucked yourself,” the little shit said.

Jaime groaned.

“You ought to have had the courtesy to die,” he said.

“I wish I had,” Jaime tried to reply. His voice creaked with disuse and the words came out slurred. He had lost teeth. A brick had fallen on his face. Probably a hundred bricks had fallen on his face.

“Everyone wishes you had, with the possible exception of me,” Tyrion said. Jaime could not see any part of Tyrion but the top of his golden head from where he lay—the bed was too high. His brother sounded extraordinarily harried. “You present problems on multiple fronts.”

“Kill me then,” Jaime mumbled.

“And add fratricide to my list of sins? No, thank you. Besides, I have no desire to fight the Maid of Tarth.”

Jaime closed his eyes and willed the blackness to come back and erase him. He was absolutely not dead. He was something very much worse. He was alive, and he would have to answer for his actions.

“She wants to kill me so much,” he said. It was not a question.

“She does not know what she wants,” Tyrion said, “but she knows she’s with child, and may the Stranger fuck me with a bull’s cock if the brat’s anyone’s but yours.”

Jaime did not open his eyes. “Cersei?”

“Dead. Her head split open like a melon.”

“Bad luck.”

“I think it’s good luck, actually.” Jaime refused to open his eyes, but he knew that Tyrion was bouncing on the balls of his feet in that annoying way he had whenever he thought that you were being tiresomely thick. “Father always wanted an heir for Casterly Rock. We’ve given him everything he dreamed of. Too bad he’s dead and can’t see it.”

“The babe’s a Snow,” Jaime said.

“It would be a Storm, as a matter of fact. But it won’t be, because you are alive, and you will marry her. After that you may do with yourself what you see fit. For my sake, brother, make it very clear that it’s suicide. I don’t want to be a fratricide, and I don’t want to be accused of being one, either.”

Tyrion waited for a moment. When Jaime said nothing, he offered, “Daenerys Targaryen is dead. Jon Snow has taken the black. Brandon Stark is our king. They call him Bran the Broken. So you see, the imps and the bastards and the broken things won in the end.”

Tyrion went away. The Silent Sisters came. They were so much a part of the scenery that Jaime did not feel embarrassed to cry in front of them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whoooooooooo this is out of ᵐʸ ᶜᵒᵐᶠᵒʳᵗ ᶻᵒⁿᵉ!!!! I have no clue how long this is going to be! But I can't stop thinking about how Jaime fucking punked out on growing and changing in show canon! And show canon LET HIM! And growing and changing is HARD! And I don't think his character arc was DONE! And so I'm gonna make it NOT BE DONE! Thank you for coming to my TED talk!!
> 
> (A note: I think book canon and show canon Jaimes are pretty divergent, but I do think that in both cases Cersei absolutely must be dealt with as a part of his life. There will be reflections on Jaime/Cersei here, so feel free to peace out if you truly hate that and want fluff, but I am nOT a J/C person so like...the reflections are the reflections on a deeply toxic relationship? UP 2 U WHAT U DO WITH THIS)


	2. Chapter 2

Though King’s Landing lay in ruins, Aegon’s Hill was still its highest point; though the Red Keep had been laid waste by dragonfire, White Sword Tower still stood, now the highest point within it.

Brienne had followed Tyrion up and down and around the city, observing the way he ordered and cajoled, the tasks he considered urgent and those he considered frivolous. The public fountains were his first concern, the grain-wagons his second; his reputation was not good, but he was capable somehow of charming people when he spoke to them face-to-face, and he never took “no” for an answer.

They had mounted the circular stair of White Sword Tower, though it was obviously heavy labor for Tyrion’s short legs, to see the destruction from above, and to discover if any fires were still burning within the city limits. Now Tyrion stood in a window, observing the waste of the city, as snow began to fall over the ashes, white-on-white. Brienne stood at parade rest, watched Tyrion.

“These are the traditional quarters of the Lord Commander of the Kingsguard,” Tyrion said.

Brienne did not react.

“They were Jaime’s quarters, for many years.”

She remained silent. Tyrion glanced over his shoulder: her face was as a stone.

“Do you know what Jon Snow said to me, after he killed Daenerys Targaryen? ‘Love is the death of duty.’” Tyrion turned to face Brienne fully. She wore her habitual armor; she looked much as she always did—a little dourer, a little colder. 

“I didn’t come here to discuss love,” Brienne said. “You said you would teach me my duty. To manage a Great House. You said that it would help if I watched you manage King’s Landing.”

“To rule a Great House,” Tyrion replied, “until your child comes of age. So that the name of Lannister doesn’t fade into obscurity.”

Brienne swallowed, looked down at her own belly. There was no difference visible there; the only difference was in her teats, still small but now sore, as they had been when she was a girl of twelve and waiting—hoping—imagining that they would come in full and womanly.

“Love is not the death of duty,” she said. “Not for a woman.” Tyrion waited, silent. She looked around the chamber. Perhaps someone had removed Jaime’s belongings; perhaps he had lived like a monk. The furnishings were rich enough, but there was no evidence of habitation. It was like a room at a very expensive inn.

“Love,” she said, “is the beginning of a woman’s duty. It is not something I expected to know much about. I thought was born to avoid it.” She crossed the room to where Tyrion stood and looked out over his head at the city. The snow made the destruction look rather pretty—picturesque, like a falling-down tower. From so high up one couldn’t hear the weeping of the burned men, the cries of children with hungry bellies, the pleading voices of people without roofs to keep the winter out. “This city burned for two mothers’ love of their children. And it _is_ a mother’s duty to love her children, and protect them.”

“Not every mother ends up killing thousands of people,” Tyrion began, then fell silent at Brienne’s expression.

“We don’t choose what we’re born,” Brienne said, “and if we’re born women, we don’t choose what we bear.”

This was a new tack for the Maid of Tarth— _the Knight of Tarth_ , Tyrion corrected himself. She had always seemed to cultivate an air of stupidity, to him, as armor against others’ judgments. But now she was elliptical as Bran the Broken. “You have grown philosophical, ser,” he said.

“My father’s maester said that philosophers love wisdom because they have nothing else left to love,” she said.

 “You just told me that a woman’s duty is love. You’re inconsistent.”

“I’m not a learned woman,” Brienne said. “I’m not _clever_. I won’t be a good Lannister.”

“See where good Lannisters have gotten us!” Tyrion turned and took Brienne’s hand in both of his. “Ser. My lady. We have strayed from my point. I said ‘love is the death of duty,’ and I believe that is how my brother saw it, when he left you.”

Tyrion’s grasp felt like a child’s. If he had intended to comfort Brienne, he had far missed the mark. She looked out at the city, at its toppled towers.

“It’s simple, to be a knight,” she said. “What he did was simple. He made no oaths to me, as he had to his sister. He thought to die keeping an oath.”

“And that makes you happy, does it?” 

“Who ever promised us happiness?” she said. “No. But I will do my duty, and put one foot in front of the other, and someday the world will seem different to me—less grey. I’m told that every mother loves her babe. Perhaps it will make up for the rest.”

“And what about Jaime?”

Brienne looked down at Tyrion, and for a moment she saw him in doubled vision—as himself, but as her child as well, a boy of eight or nine. “I don’t know,” she said, “I will have to find out what he has to say for himself.”

“When will you do that? He’s just there.” Tyrion pointed: the Silent Sisters had established themselves in the Maidenvault, only partially crushed in the wreck of the Red Keep. “I’m sure he’d be delighted to see you.”

“Not now,” Brienne said.

* * *

But it was impossible that Brienne avoid Jaime long. She was four months gone with child; if it was to be born at Casterly Rock, as befit a Lannister, there were two months of travel ahead of her; the maesters would not recommend such a journey to a woman close to her time.

For Jaime’s part the days bled into each other. His bones ached as they knit. He pissed into a cup and ate the gruel that veiled sisters spooned into his mouth. He looked at the wall. He dreamed, even without the aid of milk of the poppy, as if he were making up for the time he’d spent in blessed blackness.

He dreamed Cersei weeping in his arms. He dreamed a memory of her terrified at the last. He dreamed her giving birth, and he dreamed the baby dead.

He dreamed of being cared for as a very little child, his mother bathing him, the water splashing. He knew it was a false memory: Cersei was not in it. He dreamed a true memory, Brienne caring for him when his hand had been cut off, when the Bloody Mummers had them. She had bathed him too. He had not thought of his mother when she bathed him, but he had not thought of her as a woman, either. She was Brienne, that was all.

Brienne had done everything for him on that journey—fed him, cleaned him when he shat himself, wiped his face when he cried, changed the bandages round his bloody pus-filled stump. In his dreams it was her face behind the Silent Sisters’ veils.

Then one day he woke and it was her face, unveiled, that hovered over his bed.

“Wench,” he said.

Her full, chapped lips seemed to waver a minute; then they pressed into a line, and she said, “I take it you have been informed of—of the scheme.”

She meant the supposed marriage. “Even from the grave, Tywin Lannister gets his way,” Jaime croaked, trying to sound jocular.

“I don’t care about Tywin Lannister,” Brienne said. She looked as ugly as the day they met. He wondered if her nose had been broken again, or if it had always been so crooked. He wondered if she had a belly, and if it looked like a pot-belly beneath her armor. She was wearing a tunic and breeches; if she stood he would see.

“That makes two of us.”

“But you will marry me,” she said, “because I don’t care to be called Jaime Lannister’s whore.”

“You’d rather be his widow?” Jaime laughed. It hurt. It still hurt to do anything, though he was told that soon he would be permitted to sit up.

Her lips thinned again. “Or his wife.”

“You weren’t born to be a wife,” he said, “nor I to be a husband.”

“No,” she said, “ _you_ were born clutching your sister Cersei’s heel. But she is dead and you are alive.”

He was back with the Bloody Mummers then for a moment, bound face-to-face with Brienne on the back of a horse, could almost feel their bodies slapping against each other, and his rotting hand between them; he was back lying on cold grass and staring at the stars and hoping to die, and he was listening to Brienne say “Live, live, and fight, and take revenge.”

“I lived for Cersei,” he said. “When my hand was cut off—when everything—gods, what more can be taken from me?” He knew it was foolish to sit up, but he tried, managed to lever himself despite the pain in his splinted arms. He could feel that his face was unswollen, but the missing teeth gave him a lisp like Vargo Hoat’s. _Therthei._ Even his sister’s name had been taken.

Once he would have said that Brienne’s expression was bovine, stupid. Now he knew that she was taking his long-ago advice: _go away inside, where no one can hurt you_ . The shame of it struck him like a blow. _One more failure! One more life ruined, one more world shattered. Put it all down on the Kingslayer’s tally. He’s run up a debt so high it can’t be repaid with all the gold in Casterly Rock._ If Casterly Rock were still producing gold. Which it was not.

“You’ve made yourself a bad bargain,” Jaime said. “A poor, old, broken man, and we Lannisters aren’t even rich any more. I’ll marry you, if it’s what you truly want. How could I refuse Brienne the Beauty?”

“I made no bargain,” Brienne said. Her voice was very cold and very formal. “The gods made it, if anyone did, when they planted your babe in my belly.”

And Jaime wanted to make some answer— _I think you had something to do with that, I think I had something to do with that, and Tyrion’s stupid drinking game, and how hot you keep your gods-damned chambers, so really it’s only you to blame, in the end_ —because what was he but an awful, cutting person who ruined every good thing that came into his purview—but his body hurt, his bones hurt so badly he couldn’t sit up, and he fell back into the straw mattress with an audible thunk and a flash of bright pain and let her go, let her go, let her go.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> On the issue of timing: Jaime couldn't have taken less than two months to ride from Winterfell to King's Landing, and we see that he arrives literally on the day of the battle at King's Landing. Presumably Brienne and Sansa got a raven telling them of the outcome of the battle, rode hell-for-leather to White Harbor and took ship immediately, so the timeline just barely works out here for Brienne to be four months pregnant. Tall women with long torsos sometimes show less, and Brienne wears loose clothing, so it makes sense that she could have hidden her pregnancy.
> 
> On Brienne and Jaime's ideas about motherhood: I do not necessarily endorse the gender issues of any of these characters. ~They're gonna learn things along the way!~
> 
> On Jaime being a shithead: Think of this as a "fall seven times, rise eight" situation with Jaime, his oathbreaking issues, and his self-image resulting in his lashing out.


	3. Chapter 3

“Should you be doing this, my lady—ser?” Podrick asked, as Brienne grimly dragged her gloves on. 

“If you wondered whether my-lady-ser should be doing this,” she asked, “shouldn’t you have asked _before_ you put on my armor?”

No soldiers drilled at King’s Landing; no knights fought. Every man, woman and child still labored to clear the streets of the dead and the rubble, to shore up crumbling walls and to tamp mortar into the chinks to stop the wind. Brienne ought to have been shadowing Tyrion; she found, however, that she could not do without exercise.

A few slashes at a practice dummy showed her that she was in sore need of it. She had been dreadfully tired for weeks, and the tiredness extended to her arms, so that Oathkeeper felt as though it were made of lead rather than Valyrian steel.

A few more slashes and she realized that Pod had come to join her. She had taught him everything he knew, and they didn’t need to speak to run through the sequence of drills they always used: first Brienne attacking, then Pod; then drills to help Pod counter her reach and weight advantage, and drills to help her deal with his nimbleness.

She was in a muck-sweat by the time they at last began to spar, and not remotely on form. They fought with live steel, Pod being a very senior sort of squire, and sparks flew from where he drove his sword hard into hers. With a great roar she managed to shake him off, then forced him back, back to try and get out of the reach of her sword-arm—she could not keep the exhaustion from her face, but luckily he stumbled against a stone and came down hard—

Then she was, surprisingly and unceremoniously, flat on her back. “My lady!” Pod shouted. “I’m sorry, gods, are you—”

“I’m fine, Pod,” she grumbled as she got her breath back. It was rather difficult to stand up wearing full armor. With one mighty wrench she managed it, waving off his help. “What did you do?”

“Hooked your leg as I went down,” he admitted. “Do you know, I think it’s the first time I’ve ever bested you? And it was with a dirty trick.”

“There’s no such thing as a dirty trick in a fight,” she said, absently. “Or there is—but it’s not tripping someone.”

“Still, my lady, and you with child—”

“Shut up about the child!” Brienne found herself snapping. Even here in the training yard it followed her! One stupid mistake she had made. One moment of weakness. The horrors of the dead pouring in, the hours of fighting, more and more wights pouring into the walls of Winterfell until they were past hope, past faith, past anything but the desire to die a good death—and then the sudden reprieve, as quick as a snap of the fingers.

It had seemed then that everything bad that could possibly happen had happened, and that there was only good to come. It had seemed that she didn’t need to bother thinking about the future, for the future would take care of itself. She knew better, but she had lied to herself, had let herself relax and trust even though there was not the slightest shred of evidence that that trust was warranted.

Brienne paced the edge of the training yard. Pod maintained his distance, sword half-raised, clearly unsure if they were finished fighting or if she would come at him again out of nowhere like a wounded beast. Poor Pod, who had never been anything but faithful, who she’d have to abandon soon enough—

“Pod,” she said, “you aren’t a knight." 

“No, ser,” he said, raising his guard.

“Put that down and come here,” she said. “At least that’s one thing I can fix.”

Pod slowly set his sword on the ground. He removed his helmet, his sweat-soaked hair sticking up crazily in all directions. “Ser, are you certain…”

“If you’d rather be knighted in Baelor’s Sept, you may grow old waiting for it to be rebuilt,” she said. “I’ll need someone to take my place in the Kingsguard sooner than that. You beat me fair and square; you’ve fought in more battles than some knights do in their entire lives. You’ve earned it well." 

Pod swallowed visibly and slowly took a knee.

Brienne breathed in carefully and slowly, through her nose. _This is one of the things you can do_ , she thought to herself. _There is always something you can do to make the world a better place._

“In the name of the Warrior, I charge you to be brave,” she said, tapping Oathkeeper to his shoulder. “In the name of the Father, I charge you to be just.”

But as she spoke she heard Jaime’s golden voice saying the same words. When she had been knighted she hadn’t been able to bear looking at Jaime’s face, for fear that she would discover mockery there. She had trained her eyes instead on his belt buckle, and had listened to the words, and had only looked up when he had formed the last syllable and there was no taking them back. She had raised her eyes, filled with unwonted tears, and still half-expected to see a jest forming on his lips, but he had looked solemn, so solemn—as though he were about to cry just as much as she. Their eyes had caught, and he had looked away, and she had been grateful, for there was nothing she knew to say that could have expressed the feelings roiling in her chest.

She had thought then that she would die with him on the morrow, and that no one would live to sing a song about the golden Lion of Lannister and the beastly Maid of Tarth, fallen at Winterfell. She had been wise enough not to hope for more, then, and to be satisfied with the great good fortune she had, with the realization of her greatest dream. _Ser Brienne of Tarth, Knight of the Seven Kingdoms._

“In the name of the Mother,” she managed to say, recalling herself to the here-and-now, “I charge you to defend the innocent. Rise, Podrick Payne, Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.”

  _Six Kingdoms,_  she realized, but it was too late now to say it true.

Podrick smiled from ear to ear, and she realized that people passing had stopped and watched and now cheered—a ragged little band had gathered, Unsullied and occupants of King’s Landing, lookers-on who knew nothing of their history but only that a knight being made was something to celebrate. “Ser Podrick Payne!” one of them shouted, and Pod drew his sword and raised it over his head and said “much better than Baelor’s Sept, my lady!”

He seemed pleased enough; but Brienne could not help but think that with her clumsy tongue and her wandering memory she had marred even this moment.

* * *

 

Jaime had thought he had lost all arrogance and self-regard, that he was a hollowed shell of a person, but he had been wrong. He discovered this when Sansa Stark came to visit him, unannounced, just as he was trying desperately to stand up, his nightshirt billowing huge around his otherwise naked and wasted form.

“Hello,” she said, apparently unperturbed. _There’s one who’s grown up, since she came to King's Landing a terrified little girl._  

“My lady,” he replied, tottering and feeling a rush of embarrassment as quick and unexpected as a quail breaking from a bush. “You will forgive me for not trying to bow.”

“If you fall and kill yourself, on your own head be it,” Sansa said, and stood a little straighter. “I, for one, wouldn’t care.”

Jaime laughed. There was nothing else to do. “You came here to tell me that?” he asked. “I’ve had three visitors since they pulled me from the rubble, and they’ve all wished me dead, more or less. It’s enough to make a man think he should get on with it.”

Sansa’s face was as cruel as Cersei’s had been. _Why don’t you_ , he knew she was thinking. But he’d had worse said to him by better. What right had the wolf to judge the lion? Sansa stood very upright and very calm. “I came to tell you that you have done wrong,” she said.

He laughed again. He must sound more than a little desperate, he knew, like a madman. His skinny, broken legs couldn’t hold him; he sat on the edge of the bed and laughed again, his ribs aching. “Thank you,” he said, “for informing me.”

She looked like her mother for a moment, or like Lysa Arryn, as she found some way to stand even straighter— _Gods, she would have made a fine queen,_ he thought, before remembering that she _was_ a queen, or would be as soon as she might be crowned. “I don’t mean the things everyone knows you did,” she said, dripping with derision. “I mean the other things. The things you did to Brienne.”

 “Do you think I did anything to her that she didn’t want, little girl? She asked me— _begged_ me.”

 He had wondered if Sansa might crumble at the voice of command. She did not. “I think she doesn’t always know what’s good for her.”

“And you do?”

“I’ve seen more of the world,” she said, “and it is a cruel world. She thinks she knows about men. She doesn’t know anything about it. She doesn’t know anything about you.”

For a moment, Jaime couldn’t speak. He didn’t know what to say. Sansa knew nothing, _nothing_ of him. And yet she knew everything. Brienne knew him better than any person but Cersei, and yet she had known so little that she trusted him to love her, to stay with her— _ha_.

But at least Brienne knew him now. At least there was no more pretense.

“Do you know,” he said, as quietly as he could manage, “I think she knows everything about me. She knows that I left her for my sister, whom I fucked every night for twenty years. She knows that I killed my cousin for my sister’s sake and threw your brother out a window to hide our incest. She knows I killed Aerys Targaryen, and she knows I didn’t protect Princess Elia or her children. She knows Joffrey was a raper and a murderer and that he was half mine. She knows I mocked her every step of the way from Riverrun to King’s Landing, and therefore she knows perfectly well that I think she looks like a cow in pink silk.

“She knows all the reasons I had for the things I did—and she knows they’re not enough. And she knows that I got drunk and took her maidenhead and didn’t even have the courtesy to pretend it didn’t matter to her or to me. And she knows I left her because I am just as hateful a person as my sister is, and she knows that I thought I would be dead.”

_Ath my thithter ith._

He heard the lisp and braced for mockery, but Sansa merely said, “Was.”

“What?”

“As your sister was.”

He realized that she thought he might weep, or become angry, but in truth he had grieved Cersei long before. “You haven’t asked about my reasons.”

“They can’t be good ones.”

“Ask Brienne what she thinks of them,” he said. “Then ask yourself if you would have killed Daenerys Targaryen, if you knew what she planned to do to King’s Landing. Ask yourself what you would have done, if you were a man like your brother Jon.”

“If I were a man,” she said, “I’d swear no oaths. Then I could break none.”

Again Jaime laughed, and wondered if he would find the whole world funny now that he had nothing left to lose. “Come back on my wedding day and watch me swear again,” he said. “A true man falls seven times and rises eight, that’s what the master-at-arms used to say.”

“Brienne is a good woman and true,” Sansa said, “and I would not have her further hurt at your hands.”

“Good thing I’ve only the one, so as to do half the damage.”

Sansa left without further argument, with the air of someone who has failed at their task—though what she thought her task was, what good she thought speaking to him would do, Jaime had no idea. _He_ had not asked for this marriage. He had sought to die and take himself out of this miserable world, to trouble Brienne no more. It should have been perfectly sufficient for the Red Keep to fall on his head.

That did not seem so appealing anymore, somehow.

He had thought that he had been emptied out, that he wanted nothing more, that he was a dead man walking; Sansa’s visit had stripped him of that illusion. He was still Jaime Lannister, the Kingslayer, Cersei’s lover, Tywin’s son and Tyrion’s brother, wearer of a golden hand and sometime-wielder of a sword with an idiotic name. He still hated to be seen as weak. He _did_ want things. But what he wanted was to change the past, to change the things he had already done, to be a different person at root, and he knew from long and bitter experience that that was impossible.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OK, I promise that we are gonna come to the end of the "hurt" and take a turn into the more positive bits of this fic soon. SOON! But not yet. Jaime's got to wallow, and Brienne's got to figure out that she is actually very, very angry about the whole thing. And then we can take a hard right turn into what is essentially a forced-marriage story! (C'MON YOU ALL LOVE THESE. YOU DO. I KNOW YOU DO. I've been writing fanfic long enough to know you do.)
> 
> But hey: next chapter comes the wedding! Who's excited!? (Hint: literally not a single character in this fic! But I am! And probably some readers are!!)


	4. Chapter 4

As a very small girl—before her height had become unignorable—Brienne had dreamed of her wedding. She had imagined wearing a dress of rose-colored silk, girded with silver and gold, and crowned with her maiden’s cloak with the colors of Tarth: quarterly first and fourth rose, a sun-in-splendour or; second and third azure, a moon increscent argent.

The sun-in-splendour she bore on her shield, and the moon increscent, but she had learned to her regret that rose-colored silk did not suit her. The dresses Lady Catelyn had had made for her years ago were all, she supposed, tucked away in some trunk at Riverrun, never to be worn again. She owned not a single piece of woman’s clothing. The idea of finding a seamstress in the capital was ridiculous; if such women still lived, they were engaged in more important tasks than sewing a high lady’s wedding-dress.

In any case, it was not to be a marriage like in the songs, a marriage of love and chivalry. What mattered was that it was a marriage of _legality_. Brienne resolved to be neat and clean in tunic and breeches, and to forgo armor, as much as she might prefer to wear it. That would be all that she could promise.

The morning of the wedding dawned bright and cold and crisp. Snow had fallen in the night, and Brienne woke to silence, not even a bird singing.

“I brought you something,” Arya Stark said.

Brienne startled fully awake. Arya was seated on the foot of her bed, dressed all in black silk. Had she forgotten to bolt the door? —No, the thick bar still lay across it. Well, there was no point wondering how Arya had come; the girl would never tell.

“What have you brought me?” Brienne asked, obediently.

“Clothes,” Arya said, and threw a bundle of white cloth at her.

They weren’t woman’s clothes, but they fit: shirt, braies, hose, doublet and cotehardie, all lavishly embroidered cream-on-white. Brienne had never touched anything so fine. She drew them on gladly, then fretted for a moment that she would soil them as she broke her fast—took them off again—laid them on the bed to look at. “Where did you find such things?” she asked, as Arya sat and calmly pared her fingernails.

“White Sword Tower,” she said.

Of course—who would wear cream-on-white but the Kingsguard? “Are they Jaime’s?”

Arya laughed. “He’s too short. I think Cersei had them made for the Hound. He’s dead now, so you might as well have them. He’d have hated them anyway.”

Brienne had forgotten, if she had ever known, that the Hound had been a member of the Kingsguard. Wearing his clothes sent an odd frisson down her spine: she had bested him in battle, left him for dead, and now she claimed his worldly goods, was that it?

She had thought the wedding would be a small affair, and perhaps it was, compared to Joffrey Baratheon’s; but when she left her chambers she found that Podrick waited to escort her, not to the sept but to a fine white charger, richly caparisoned, with ribbons in its mane and tail. She was to ride it, apparently, though the sept was less than a half-mile distant; and she was not to control it herself, but to be led by Pod, splendid in his Kingsguard armor. Arya followed, her attendant.

She obeyed; it was not her place to disobey, not now, when she had come so far. At least they did not expect her to ride side-saddle. But her heart quailed, almost, when she saw the smallfolk lining the way.

 _You have suffered worse than their jeers,_ she thought. _At least they cannot touch you._

“A Beauty, a Beauty!” the cry went up, and it was all Brienne could do to hold her head high. She hoped only that the horse held her far enough away from the crowds that they could not see the tears welling in her eyes. It was not that she cared what they thought of her, ungainly and unwomanly, a clumsy cow going to wed the handsome Lion of Lannister; it was only—it was only—she could not say what it was.

“Is it that bad?” Pod called up to her, trying to keep his voice low as he led the horse. “I thought you _liked_ Ser Jaime.”

“It isn’t that,” she managed to say, trying to force a smile. “They mock me, that’s all.”

Pod was puzzled. “They don’t mock you, my lady,” he said. “They _love_ you.”

“A Beauty, a Beauty!” the cry carried on, and with it, “Wightslayer, Nightslayer!”

Arya spurred her horse up to match Brienne’s neck-and-neck— _she_ was allowed to hold her own reins, Brienne noted. “It’s the Imp,” she said, surveying the cheering crowds with an air of Stark superiority. “He’s decided to make us all into _stories_.”

“Us?”

“It turns out people _like_ warrior women,” Arya said, “if they’re getting properly married. Or if they’re helping their friend get properly married. We’re the Beauty and the Nightslayer now. Tall and short. White and black. Honorable and sneaky. Don’t you forget it.”

* * *

Jaime wondered if perhaps he had been left at the altar.

It seemed he had been standing forever. Tyrion had planned the wedding as soon as he could possibly stand, but they had not figured on Brienne being so abominably late. They had sung hymns and prayed prayers and it was time for her to _arrive_ , gods be damned! He gritted what was left of his teeth and shifted his weight: the right leg was a little better than the left. Sansa Stark, sitting demurely next to her brother Bran, smiled at him, a little unkindly.

“Lean on me,” Tyrion offered, and Jaime had nothing jesting to say back. He was grateful.

Then the doors at the end of the sept opened, letting the winter sunlight in, and there they were.

Perhaps, if King Bran could walk, he would have escorted Brienne to her husband. As it was, the task fell to Ser Podrick Payne—a strange inversion, since Ser Podrick had been her squire only days before. _Could no one send word to Selwyn of Tarth_? Jaime wondered. Brienne had parted with her father on bad terms, that much he knew, but surely a wedding would do much to turn him up sweet…?

Jaime tried to focus on these matters to keep his mind off the pain in his legs, or, worse, whatever expression might be playing across Brienne’s windowpane face. It did not matter what she thought; they would be married regardless, so why should he torment himself with her misery?

It was impossible not to notice his bride, however. She held herself tall, not slumping and shrinking as she had when they first met, and she walked like a knight, not like a lady. She was dressed like a knight as well—a knight of the Kingsguard, complete with Oathkeeper at her side. She was magnificent.

It struck him then that perhaps that was why Tyrion had insisted he wear a sword—not any sword, but the sword Joffrey had called Widow’s Wail. “King Bran has instructed me to give it into your hands only,” Tyrion had said, though Jaime suspected that King Bran had very little to do with it. “He has taken the liberty of renaming it for you: Maiden’s Kiss.” Oathkeeper and Maiden’s Kiss: sister blades forged from Ice, now to be united. How very appropriate.

Brienne was dressed like a member of the Kingsguard, and for a moment he could imagine that she was coming to be knighted, not to be wed. But white was the wedding color as well, and as Podrick delivered her to Jaime’s side he could no longer pretend.

The prayers he had heard, the hymns that had been sung—all had been oriented to the future. There were years ahead of them, the prayers said: there would be children and joys and sorrows and success in every realm of life.

Lies, of course, nearly all of it: but one child was near-certain. And the years were certain. Time did, it seemed, go marching on.

There would be worse people to spend it with than Brienne of Tarth, assuming she didn’t banish him to some far-flung rock off her Sapphire Isle. She was beautiful in her hard, homely way, Jaime thought: those uneven features came together in a kind face, and her mannish frame was long and lean and lovely, if one looked only at her and not at the little people who flitted around her. And her eyes were chips of sapphire. And what had already passed between them—those memories he would _not_ summon now, here in a sept before the eyes of the kingdoms.

“Cloak the bride, and bring her under your protection,” the septon said.

Off came the maiden cloak. “I’m sorry it’s such a poor thing, Ser Brienne,” Tyrion muttered as she fingered the suns-and-stars, clumsily basted on. “It was the best I could do.”

“The smallfolk didn’t mind,” she told him graciously, and gave it to him to hold.

Jaime knew that the Lannister cloak would slip through the slick gold fingers of his false right hand, but he been crippled long enough now to know how to manage. Brienne bent her knees to let him swirl it around her shoulders, not making it harder than it had to be.

Perhaps they might find a way forward after all. At least for now.

* * *

Brienne had thought herself well past maiden’s fantasies. She had fought with knights and seen the truth of battle; she had served with men she loved, and they had let her down, each and every time. And she was angry with them for their falseness, angry with them for being so much worse than she had supposed them to be.

But Brienne entered the sept and saw Jaime Lannister there, standing by the statue of the Father, and she could not stop her traitorous heart from leaping.

She had first seen Jaime in chains, his hair matted and filthy. She had seen him bruised and battered in every possible way, watched pus seep from the place where his hand had been, cleaned him and cared for him, cut his hair and trimmed his beard. She had seen him weakened and lost and saddened—and she had thought that she had seen him strong and happy, too.

She realized now that she had never seen Jaime Lannister resplendent.

He had lost weight, since the clothes he wore had been made; but that only made the haughty modeling of his face stand out the stronger. His cheeks had been shaved smooth as marble; his hair had grown, and been washed and rinsed with lemon, so it shone in luxuriant golden waves. The red of his velvet raiment, slashed with cloth-of-gold, only made his eyes the more piercingly green.

Certainly, the gold of his hair was shot with silver; certainly his face was pale with winter and with illness; but to Brienne he seemed closer to that dream-knight, the Jaime Lannister whose name she had heard in story when she was just a little girl, than ever he had been. And yet also he seemed closer to the Jaime Lannister of Winterfell, the Jaime who had stumbled drunk into her chambers and tried to seduce her in the clumsiest possible way, the Jaime who had buried his face between her legs and told her she tasted as salty as the sea.

She did not want to think of these things, but she couldn’t help it, not when he stood and smiled—closed-lipped, he had lost teeth, she supposed he must be embarrassed about it—but _smiled_ as though he had never walked away from her.

The Lannister cloak was warm and heavy with embroidery, and Jaime had been wearing it all morning: as he wrapped her in it, needing only the tiniest bit of help, she realized it smelled like comfort. Like him.

She had so longed for him there in the snow as he rode away from Winterfell. She had gone back to her chambers—to _their_ chambers, where they had slept night after night—and had buried her face in the pillow where he had rested his head, and had inhaled that scent.

The next day the bedclothes had been changed and it was gone.

And today Jaime Lannister, the oathbreaker, the man whom Brienne had loved and who had left her standing in the snow, chanted the words with her: “Father, Smith, Warrior, Mother Maiden, Crone, Stranger, I am hers and she is mine from this day until the end of my days.”

“With this kiss, I pledge my love,” Jaime said, and pressed his lips gently and chastely to hers. They were very nearly of a height, but still she had to tip her head down to let him do it. No one had thought to set her on a lower stair.

The audience applauded. It was done.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Widow’s Wail being renamed as Maiden’s Kiss is shamelessly stolen from dreadwulf’s A Man For All Seasons (https://archiveofourown.org/works/12448695/chapters/28327809), a fic which I cannot recommend highly enough. Dreadwulf, I hope you will forgive the impertinence and accept that I dedicate this story to you in exchange.


	5. Chapter 5

Brienne did not entirely understand why there had to be a feast. For one thing, food was a problem, and if the winter was as long as it might be, they’d be eating shoe leather by the time it was over. For another, the stench of the dead still filled half the alleyways in King’s Landing. Yet the feast had seemed to be a foregone conclusion; people had begun speaking of it weeks before as “ _when_ we have the wedding feast—” rather than “ _if_.”

The great halls had all been burnt by Daenerys’ dragons, so the only suitable place to hold a large gathering was the Dragonpit; fortunately the sun had come out while they were in the sept, and it was not as cold as it might otherwise have been, and between the press of people and the great bonfires that had been kindled every few hundred feet it was quite tolerable.

Jaime was carried to the high table in a litter, and installed on a couch with furs all round him; Brienne privately thought that he looked rather more kingly than Brandon Stark. She herself rode, this time insisting on holding her own reins. It seemed that every person in the city had been given a holiday.

“Tyrion’s doing, I suppose,” she had remarked to Ser Davos Seaworth, who had fetched up next to her in the train of people traveling cross-town from the Red Keep to the Dragonpit.

“No-o,” he said, “as a matter of fact it was mine. You can’t expect people to bury the dead day after day without celebrating that they’re alive themselves, my lady.”

And celebrate they did. The smallfolk had to be satisfied with pottage and barley bread and beer, but that didn’t stop them from making merry; at the high table, there were no spun-sugar phantasies or pigeon pies—the kitchens had better things to do than spend hours on such frippery—but fifteen men working together _did_ parade a whole roast aurochs before them and slice its meat right off the bone. “In honor of Lady Brienne,” the cook announced, “for the tallest maid in Westeros requires the biggest roast at her wedding feast!”

“ _Smile_ , wench,” Jaime whispered, his elbow finding her ribs. His words had the faintest hint of a lisp, now, and Brienne refused to find it charming. “It’s meant honestly.”

Brienne obediently smiled, and accepted the best cut of meat.

“You remember how I used to call you a cow?” Jaime asked.

“How could I forget?” Brienne poured herself more wine: someone had supplied the happy couple with Arbor gold.

“I take it back,” Jaime said. “You’re nothing like as big as that aurochs. You’re just the right size for fighting people.”

“Is that supposed to be a compliment?” she asked.

“How can you doubt it?” Jaime said, smiling that close-lipped smile—she couldn’t quite tell if it was mocking or not, for it was a strange new expression on him. “Your wedding clothes suit you as well. You were made for the Kingsguard.”

“Too bad you’ve made it impossible for me to serve that way,” Brienne said shortly, and fell silent, for King Bran had called for a toast.

Several rounds of toasting followed, until Brienne’s head swum from drink. Finally, when it seemed that all the lords of Westeros had toasted their marriage, Tyrion stood on the table—right _on_ it, in the midst of the plates and cups—and told the story of the night he knew his brother was in love.

“They fought the wights,” he declared, “and when I came up from the safety of Winterfell’s crypt—for you know I am a famous coward, gentlefolk—” (there was a laugh) “When I came up from the crypt, I found them in each other’s arms. They had fought barely a few feet apart for hours, but in the heat of the battle each believed the other to have died facing the wights.”

This was, in fact, true, though Brienne remembered it as somewhat less intimate than Tyrion made it sound. They had both been in full armor, after all. She had embraced Podrick in just the same way when she found that he had survived. Still, it made for a good story. In Tyrion’s version they had kissed and pledged their troth then and there, which was certainly _un_ true.

Brienne was seated at Jaime’s right, so she could not take his hand-of-flesh; she took the hand-of-gold in hers instead, though she didn’t look at him. He did not jerk it away.

Tyrion’s announced that he had a present for them, a present they could share with all of King’s Landing. Brienne hardly had time to wonder what this could be when there was a roll of drums and a thrum of lutes: a singer came dancing through the crowds to them and sketched an outrageously elaborate bow. He struck up a lively tune and sang: 

> The lion of Lannister lay by the throne  
>  A-charged to care for his king,  
>  And outside the throne room the little mice went  
>  A-working at every thing.
> 
> The King of the Andals and of the First Men  
>  His mind had gone far astray,  
>  “I’ll burn you, my pretties, if you won’t be mine,  
>  “And laugh as we all burn away.”
> 
> The Lion had sworn him a terrible oath  
>  He’d sworn it again and again  
>  But the Lion knew oaths are but words in the wind  
>  And the mice are living men.
> 
> So the Lion reared up and the Lion pounced down  
>  He bit off the Mad King’s head.  
>  “I’ll never regret breaking my oaths,  
>  "I’ll swear oaths to the people instead.
> 
> “For the mice, they laugh, and the mice, they play;  
>  "The mice run over my feet;  
>  "But the mice are no food for the King o’ the Beasts  
>  "And the meat of a king is sweet.”

Jaime had a look of slack-jawed amazement that might have made Brienne laugh in other circumstances. As it was she had too many questions. She had told Sansa of Aerys’ wildfire, yes, but this wasn’t Sansa’s work. Whoever had told him, or if he had figured it out for himself, Tyrion was clearly pleased as punch at his brother’s reaction. The singer went on: 

> The lion of Lannister paced in a cage,  
>  Caught by a mummers’ band;  
>  They’d beat him and shorn him and taken his sword  
>  And cut off his good right hand.
> 
> The mummers had caught them a maiden of Tarth,  
>  As strong as a Dothraki mare;  
>  She bit them and kicked them and made them to bleed  
>  They threw her to the King o’ the Bears.
> 
> A shieldmaid she was, and fiercely she fought,  
>  But they’d gave her a sword of wood;  
>  The bear towered over that statuesque maid  
>  He’d eat her where she stood.
> 
> And the Lion reared up and the Lion pounced down,  
>  He bit off the bear’s great head.  
>  “I’ll keep Mother’s oath, my oath to all maids,  
>  “To protect and to guard them from threat.
> 
> “For the mice, they laugh, and the mice, they play;  
>  "The mice run over my feet;  
>  "But the mice are no food for the King o’ the Beasts  
>  "And the meat of a king is sweet.”

There were many more verses, casting Jaime as the great defender of the people. The Lion of Lannister defeated a “king o’ the wildlings” in a duel for his maiden’s hand, and killed a “king o’ the wights” with her help. Finally he killed a lioness-queen who’d gone mad in mourning for her cubs; then he bowed to King Bran, who swore never to harm a mouse.

“I thought it was time to retire ‘Rains of Castamere,’” Tyrion shouted at them over the noise of the chorus. “I haven’t learned much, but the power of a song—that I’ve learned!”

Jaime frowned. “Did it have to be a pack of lies about me when you’ve Ser Brienne right there, as true a knight as ever was? She’s a Lannister now too.”

“Why not both? He’s working on another for her. I thought to give it to her as a gift when she presents you with your heir.”

“He needn’t,” Brienne said, feeling her face pink with pleasure. “Thank you, Tyrion.”

“Yes, he _needs_ to,” Tyrion informed her. “If House Lannister is to ever regain its reputation, one famous knight won’t be enough, and the songs they sing about me aren’t half so complimentary.”

* * *

 Jaime had thought himself a cripple before, but now he knew what being crippled truly was.

He had watched the dancing at his own wedding feast and been incapable of joining in. Tyrion had made a joke of it, of course, inviting Ser Brienne to dance, and making much of the fact that his head came barely to her hip. There were mountain-climbing jokes, and jokes about which Lannister Brienne really ought to have, and Jaime tried to remind himself that none of it mattered to him, that he was merely a vessel, a conduit through which Casterly Rock might pass to Brienne’s babe.

At least he could get himself up to piss. That was an improvement over having the Silent Sisters hold his cock so he might relieve himself into a jar.

Still, he couldn’t get far; the couch was the place for him, especially as the night wore longer and he realized he’d not had so much excitement since the Red Keep fell on his head months before. Brienne kept dancing, and people kept coming up to him to pay their respects. He knew them all, of course—he had had no idea that so many Lannisters still lived in King’s Landing, however. His Aunt Genna (a Frey by name but a Lannister through-and-through) had had the sense to take herself and her grandchildren back to Casterly Rock before the city fell, but it seemed there were infinite Tywins, Tytoses, Rions, Tyllas, Tynias, and at least one maid with the unfortunate name of Jaimei. These were House Lannister’s cadet lines, which had done his father’s bidding, and Jaime had assiduously ignored them for as many years as he could.

“You’ll want to speak with my wife,” he said half-a-hundred times, as they asked about his plans, whether Tarth would pledge to Casterly Rock, whether their first child would inherit the Rock or the island, whether they intended to return to the Westerlands for the birth, and on, and on, and on. By the end he had agreed to accept two pages and a lady-in-waiting for Brienne, if only to get rid of a particularly persistent relation.

By the time Bronn—no, it was _Lord_ Bronn Blackwater now—sauntered up, it was almost a relief to see him.

“No crossbow this time,” Jaime managed to sally.

“You might wish for one by the time we’re through with you and your lady,” Bronn said, and cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, “the bedding! The bedding!”

“Seven hells,” Jaime complained. “Brienne will have your head.”

“She’s welcome to try, my lord,” Bronn said, “People _like_ a bedding. Makes the wedding feel real and all. And then, don’t you think that’d start a tiny war? Me being the Lord of Highgarden.”

“Your people don’t know you from a stump,” Jaime said, swinging his legs off the couch and trying to stand—thinking, perhaps, that if he could just get ahead of the women... “They won’t care if you die. A lord’s a lord to them, if the lord’s not a Tyrell.”

“I’ll take my chances,” Bronn said, and headed with purpose towards the dancing, where Brienne still capered, unaware of her fate.

Jaime glanced about him. There was Arya Stark on one side and Sansa on the other.

“Better to lie down and let them have their way with you,” Tyrion advised. “They’ll do it anyway. I’ll help!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I recorded [an mp3 of "The Lion of Lannister"](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1f5rDt0wkdNPIz2NHYI0q34ZRL7hk9u2g/view?usp=sharing) if you're interested in hearing the tune. 
> 
> The attitude towards beddings, I take from the novels. In the show, it seems like most of the people we sympathize with think of beddings as an abhorrent custom. But in the novels we see that Catelyn and Eddard were bedded, and that Sansa thought it was "wicked" but fun (until she was wed against her will to Tyrion). I hold that beddings are absolutely expected in Westeros and, in this context (where they both know it's coming on some level and where no one's actively mocking Brienne as ugly), Brienne and Jaime both might drag their feet a little but would not find it horrific. YMMV!


	6. Chapter 6

When the men of King’s Landing finally delivered her to her bridal chamber, Brienne was still nearly fully clothed. Lord Blackwater had argued persuasively in favor of the tradition of the bedding, but the fact remained that no man would dare to remove a single article of clothing from the Maid of Tarth’s person without her permission. She generously removed her own surcoat and allowed it to be waved about like a flag, then permitted them to try lifting her in the air, as was the custom. Much to her shock, they succeeded—though admittedly it took a fair bit of maneuvering. Eventually Ser Davos took charge and instructed the younger men how best to hoist.

The experience of being bobbed about on the shoulders of a crowd of drunken, shouting men wasn’t entirely comfortable, but it was oddly consoling. Brienne had lived among soldiers for years without ever sharing in their jests and japes: the best of them grew silent when she came near, and the worst sharpened their tongues on her. Now she was the focus of the ribaldry, but it was all in good fun. “See you don’t _crush_ him, ser-my-lady!” “Ah, but if she does he’ll die happy, won’t he?” “Never you mind he’s lost his looks, you’ve beauty enough for both!” “Cor, d’you think those legs could wrap a man twice round? Want to practice on me, woman?”

“If I do, you’ll have to watch out for the Lion of Lannister’s claws,” she shouted back at the last, amazed at her own daring. She must have drunk more Arbor gold than she’d imagined. “I don’t have to fight my own battles now, do I?”

That won her a round of laughter and more sallies about _battles_ and _swords_ and _sheaths,_ and several someones declaring they’d rather fight Jaime than the mighty Maid of Tarth, and they put her down and let her walk the last little way to the bridal-chamber in relative dignity, slapping her on the back like a comrade.

“Keep yourselves out of the doorway now,” Lord Blackwater said, pushing the rest of the men back. “Let her go to her fate alone, eh? She’s got a lion to tame! Let’s toast the bedding!”

“The bedding, the bedding!” they cried, and as the hulloo was still going about Bronn opened the door to the bedchamber and pushed her inside, away from their prying eyes. She was still laughing as she turned and secured the bar. She trusted Lord Blackwater to distract them, but she had no faith that drunken men wouldn’t turn right round and try to harass them in the bed itself.

“You enjoyed yourself, did you?” Jaime asked.

Brienne turned and took in the room for the first time: roaring fire, wine and cheese on a table, an ewer of water and towels. Everything a couple might need. Someone had planned ahead: the Unsullied were quartered around the Dragonpit, and their accommodations were surely not so plush. The room was dominated by an enormous boat of a bed hung about with red damask curtains. Jaime was a startlingly small figure within it, lying propped up on a pillow, naked as the day he was born.

“Did you?” Brienne asked, her face scarlet: for all in a rush the situation came home to her.

“Why, since you ask, yes,” he said, “having broken every bone in my body not three months ago, I love to be jolted and jostled and to have the clothes torn off my back.”

“Not really torn, surely?”

“Arya tried,” he said. “Sansa suggested they cut them off with a dagger. You can imagine how pleasant it was to have Starks with daggers near all my tenderest parts. Of course the Lannisters didn’t defend me. Did you know I have a cousin named Jaimei, who’s borne a grudge against me for her name for the entire eighteen years of her life?”

“And this cousin ripped your smallclothes off?”

“I could not rightly say. After a certain point, you know, all maids look the same.”

“Do we?” Brienne asked, and dared to approach the bed.

Jaime’s body had always been scarred, the result of years of tourneys and years of fighting. It was ironic then that Brienne couldn’t see a new mark on him, though the entire Red Keep had fallen down on his head.

She had seen him naked many times, of course. He had no more shame about his body than the tiniest child—why should he? He was formed like a golden god. He was thinner now than he had been, perhaps, the first time she saw him, but his shoulders were still broad enough to bear the weight of the world. They still tapered to that slim waist—a swimmer’s waist, they would have called it on Tarth. The same weight of muscle still defined his thighs and legs. After months in bed even his feet were as soft as a lady’s, and even they were perfectly formed, the second toe longer than the first, very high in the instep. She had laughed, once, to see that they were larger than hers, though she was the taller, and called him “boat-boots.” His remaining hand was still strong, long-fingered. He had taken the golden hand off, but his stump was hidden in a fold of the bedclothes. A person who cared for such things would be able to imagine him whole.

He had never been with any woman but Cersei, he had told Catelyn Stark, the first time she saw him.

Now Cersei was dead and Jaime was here, helpless, broken.

Brienne knew he could hardly move. He would have asked her to dance if he could; the only reason he had not yet flung himself off some high tower was that he knew exactly how important it was that their wedding be seen as legitimate, and he would do what was necessary to make that come to pass.

It occurred to her that perhaps that was why, after the maids had deposited him in their bridal bed, he hadn’t twitched the coverlet over his cock. Perhaps he thought the marriage needed consummation to be real, even though the evidence of their precipitate fucking was the babe growing within her.

“Oh, stop looking,” Jaime said. “Here’s what you want to see,” and gave her a toothy smile. The right front tooth was out entirely, and the left was dead at the root, gone a sickly shade of yellow.

Brienne had no answer: she didn’t know what she thought, much less what she wanted to say. It was a pity that anything so beautiful should be marred. He was still a handsome man—half the men in Westeros had teeth missing, and most of them had been ugly to begin with. The disfigurement didn’t bring him within spitting distance of Brienne’s beastly looks. Yet she felt, a little, that he deserved it, for leaving her weeping at Winterfell.

“For gods’ sake,” she said, suddenly very tired. “Let me be.”

* * *

 

Brienne had come through the door in a cloud of happiness and good cheer, and Jaime supposed he ought to be proud of how quickly he had managed to dispel it.

“For gods’ sake,” she said, “let me be.” A retort sprung more quickly to his tongue than he would have believed, but he bit it back.

She looked small, somehow. It was wrong that she looked so small.

He held his tongue. She drank a long draught of wine, her throat working. How much had she drunk at the wedding? More than he had ever seen her drink before. _She must be half in her cups. A maudlin drunk._

“I can’t say I’m sorry,” Jaime said, “if that’s what you want.”

“Why would I want you to say you’re sorry?”

“Because I did you a great wrong.”

She was silent, staring into her cup. She leaned against the bedpost.

“I should never have come to your rooms,” he said. “I should never have touched you.” He had offered her false coin for honest love. For so many years he had taken comfort in no woman but Cersei; he had shown more courtesy to every woman in Westeros than he did to Brienne. She was too truthful, too wholesome, too honorable—he too spoilt, not by his maiming, but by a deeper sickness that he had only begun to fathom when he came north.

“Was that where you went wrong,” she said, her tone flat, unquestioning. “The touching.”

“Yes, obviously,” he said, “or else you would be the Lady Commander of the Kingsguard now, not a _wife_.”

“Was it the touching that was wrong, do you think,” she said, “or the not-loving? I know I am not lovable, and I know you never said otherwise, but it seems to me—ser—that you lied to me every day, with your actions if not with your lips. I did not know men could lie with their bodies so.”

_I know I am not lovable._

Did he not love her? How could he have loved her? The Kingslayer couldn’t love. He couldn’t love fair maidens; he couldn’t love the children of his body; he couldn’t love anyone but his sister. They were two halves of the same soul, after all, and if her half had proven so twisted, his must have always been twisted as well. Brienne’s goodness, her lovingkindness, had absolved him of every broken oath, but it could not absolve him of Cersei—it could not absolve him of _himself_.

Yet he saw Brienne folding up into herself—diminishing—calling herself unworthy… She was fighting manfully against tears, but he knew they swam in her eyes, unshed. “I was ruined already,” he said, “and you were so young.”

They were the wrong words. He saw the scorn on her face.

“You were so young,” he repeated. “How could you doubt that I loved you, the only good and honest thing in this filthy fucking world?” To his amazement and hers he was weeping. He could hardly breathe through the tears, and though he covered his face to try and hide the shame of his weakness— _Brienne, the maudlin drunk? Ha!_ —she would not let him. She sat on the bed and lifted him into her lap as easily as a child, and cradled him to her chest.

When the storm passed, he lifted his head. For the first time he felt embarrassment at his nudity. But he looked up and there were tears on Brienne’s face as well, and for once he did not think of himself.

“How could I not love you,” Jaime said, and he watched her smile that lovely lopsided smile—much nicer than anyone else’s for being so rare—and for the first time in twenty years his soul offered a silent prayer of abject gratitude for the very first thing that he had somehow, miraculously, failed to ruin.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guess what I spent this Memorial Day doing?
> 
> This was a hard one to write. Thanks to themegalosaurus for telling me she loves it when characters have emotional breakdowns. Me, too, but I didn't see this one coming! I had an entirely different scene planned, but Jaime just absolutely lost it on me.


	7. Chapter 7

Jaime woke the morning after his wedding to a deep and pervading sense of peace and well-being.

Snow had fallen again in the night—he could see it in the fern frost on the window and the drift heaped on the sill. Perhaps it was the snow that gave the sense of peace. When he was a child he had loved the snow, the rare times it fell on Casterly Rock: it seemed like an altar-cloth laid over all the ugliness in the world. He hadn’t learned to dislike it until he came north, and discovered what it meant to be really cold.

It wasn’t really cold in King’s Landing, though. Brienne must have banked the fire before they slept.

She lay next to him, peaceful too, her face relaxed in slumber. Long before he had ever touched her he had learned that she composed herself for sleep like a knight on a tomb, legs outstretched, hands folded over her breast. It was remarkable how she would lie that way, even on the coldest and rockiest ground, as though even in the deepest watches of the night she could not put off the mantle of chivalry.

She was different now, though. It had been hard to see under the layers of clothes she always wore, hard to see when she stood so tall and carried a sword and swaggered like a man, but beneath her linen tunic her belly  _ curved _ .

There was nothing else different about her. Her cornsilk hair still waved back from her high forehead; freckles still powdered her broken nose; her skin was still blue-veined ivory; her powerful muscles were still visible even in repose, and he knew that if she stood and moved they would appear larger still. Her hips were still narrow for her frame. Yet there was a sweet softness to her middle now.

Jaime could not resist the urge to press his hand to it, though he knew it might wake Brienne. Her flesh was warm. Was it harder, that belly, than Cersei’s had been? Jaime hardly knew: she hadn’t liked to be touched there, had shoved his hands away, told him to put them to better use.

There was a  _ flutter _ .

The first time Cersei had been pregnant it was Robert’s, and she had hated every minute of it, called it a parasite growing inside her, told him that she didn’t want him to look at her and see how she’d been polluted. He had never pressed the issue. The babe had died; she was happy, and he was not sorry.

The second time it was his, and he had thought that perhaps she would let him see and understand, let him learn about it. It had seemed to him that if they were one soul in two bodies then this was a miraculous sort of parthenogenesis, and that it ought to bring them closer. She had not barred him from her chambers that time, but she had hardly opened up to him: the best thing he could give her, she said, was his cock and his silence. At the end there was a wrinkled scrunched little baby, beautiful and screaming, and Cersei relieved to be done with the matter.

Fluttering he remembered, and kicking: past a certain point it was hard to miss. He had wondered idly then what it would feel like, to have a child inside—but Cersei’s body was so different from his own that he could not quite imagine it. Brienne twinned him better than Cersei ever had, breadth to breadth, and now he could almost envision the possibility. 

Of course the child would be born, eventually, and have its own life; possibly it would be like Cersei, or possibly like Myrcella—no one could say. Possibly it would hate its father as much as Jaime had. Possibly it would be twins—his fingers tightened on Brienne’s stomach, a reflexive gesture.

“Jaime,” Brienne said, blinking awake, “what are you doing?”

“Wondering what my orders are,” he said, not moving his hand. He had learned long ago that it was better to be insouciant than to be weak. If she didn’t want him touching her, why, she would have to tell him. “If I understand aright, I’m your sworn sword now.”

She frowned. “Who told you  _ that _ ?”

“I surmised,” he said. “Tyrion says he’s been teaching you to lord it over Casterly Rock. Well, then, there’ll be no place for me but as your man-at-arms, will there?”

“Tyrion thought you were going to put an end to yourself,” she said, not smiling. “I knew better.”

“How?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I suppose I thought that as long as you had a child to think of you wouldn’t.” Her hand slipped unconsciously to her belly, encountered his, recoiled. “You always seemed to love your children very much.”

“More than I loved you?” he asked, finishing her sentence, because it seemed to be what she meant, and also because it might possibly have been true. How could he rank his loyalties, his love for his family?  _ Every person one cares about is like another oath. Once even a single person is admitted into that magic circle of care, they multiply; then their needs diverge; then they come into conflict; then there is no way forward, except to forswear oneself, to betray one’s kin... _

She was stone-silent.

“Brienne,” he said, “has she ever kicked before?”

“No,” she replied. “Not ever.”

* * *

 

To wake with Jaime’s hand on her, nearly on her bare flesh—this was a sweetness Brienne had longed for,  _ longed _ for, day after day after day.

She had hardly let herself think of it before the Battle of Winterfell. The thought had crossed her mind (how could it not?) but it was in a treacherous space so far outside the realm of possibility yet so close within her grasp. She hadn’t dared to nurse her love the way she’d nursed her feelings for Renly, had earnestly hoped to forget the way his beautiful long-fingered hands curled around the pommel of a sword, the scent of his body fresh from a bath.

Then after the Battle of Winterfell he had come to her drunk and stupid, and he had begun to take off his shirt, and she had thought,  _ why not. _ She had thought,  _ it’s just what the men on the Wall do. _ She had heard those stories, of course, whenever a black crow had come South; she had heard them again from the lips of those who didn’t like Jon Snow. Men on the wall sought comfort in each other. And she and Jaime were the next things to the Night’s Watch now. Weren’t they?

“I’ve never slept with a knight before,” he’d said.

“I’ve never slept with anyone before,” she’d said.

“Then you have to drink,” he’d said. “Those are the rules.”

And then he had kissed her and she had lost her reason.

She had not expected the way her body brushed against his as they kissed, the way her nipples hardened when they touched his skin. She had known men to have foul breath, but his was only like the Dornish wine they had both been drinking. She had not realized that there would be so much spit and sweat and marshiness, or that she wouldn’t mind it. She reached to smooth back his hair and was permitted. No one jumped out to laugh at her.  _ This is what being a knight is, _ she thought, deliriously, as he walked her backwards step by slow step to find the bed.  _ It is being free to only feel, and not be a weeping worried woman. _

It was a time outside the world, she thinks now, a precious time when all rules were suspended. They spoke very little; they lived instead. Jaime’s hands were on her whenever they were alone, and when they were with others he did not deny her. The wildlings called her his woman, and everyone else smiled to see them. 

They spoke very little, and Brienne found that it was easier that way. She had never been glib and now Jaime wasn’t either. He was as easy and quiet and unbounded as water with her. She might touch him wherever she liked, put the tip of her finger into his navel, trace a line between his buttocks, examine each hair on his chest. It felt as though she were rewriting that awful journey with Vargo Hoat, erasing all the shit and blood and anger and replacing it with lemon soap from Dorne and the clean scent of woodsmoke. 

But Jaime had spoilt the illusion when he rode away, and it could never be rebuilt, not exactly the same way, for now his hand was on her swollen belly, and now they were married. Now she was a woman,  _ his _ woman _ ,  _ in a way she had hoped never to be. (Or a way she had hoped to be, but seen so very long ago was impossible; a way she had hoped to be when she thought she would stop growing, when she thought she would begin to like sewing if she only gave it time, when she thought her voice might go sweet and high again—)

“Perhaps you  _ should _ be my sworn sword,” she said slowly. “I won’t go back to being a woman.”

“Go back to being a woman?” Jaime said, instantly. “You’re big and ugly and strong as the Hound, but you’re all woman, all right. Who’s been saying otherwise? I’ll beat them to death with my golden hand.”

“I don’t mean my cunt,” she said, and felt his hand twitch again where it lay. She had shocked him: she had never used words like that before. “I mean that I won’t wear a dress, and I won’t sit in a solar and broider the day away.”

“Who says you ought to?” Jaime asked.

“Only to be clear,” she said, and looked at him. She could not decide if he really meant it, or if he would keep meaning it, and there was no way to ask.

_ Which is the knight and which is the lady _ ? Vargo Hoat’s voice rang in her head.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I regret to inform you that one of you scoundrelly readers pointed out that if Cersei were still around she would definitely make Jaime get a false gold tooth, and then sent me this:
> 
> If I have to look at it, you all have to look at it too. (THE GLINT!!!) But I can promise that this is NOT GOING TO HAPPEN IN THIS STORY, ffs. If it was, I would definitely go all the way and make him wear a grill full of rubies.


	8. Chapter 8

After the wedding Jaime did not know what would happen. No one had bothered to tell him. It was unclear if anyone had thought of what he would do. 

Were he honest with himself, this was not an entirely fresh turn of events. He had made remarkably few choices in his life (he did not count king-killing; the burning knowledge that anyone would have done the same as he in such a situation, which undergirded his entire towering sense of ill-usage, also prevented him from assigning any great merit or sin to Aerys’ murder, at least when he was thinking logically). The choices he  _ had _ made were not notably good ones. It seemed perfectly reasonable to go on as he had begun and let the stream take him where it would.

A hatchet-faced pair of serving girls silently moved Brienne’s things into the Maidenvault rooms he had called his own, and he spent a morning playing lady’s maid, arranging them. He just about had enough wind for that. He fell asleep early and woke in the deep watches of the night to the realization that Brienne was in the bed next to him. 

He learned, soon, that they would set out for Casterly Rock once he was able to sit a horse. He would be traveling in a wheelhouse, of course—Brienne took this for granted—but she felt that it was unsafe to travel so slowly without an escape plan. He opened his mouth to say something about whether she ought to be riding a horse, then closed it again. 

Now it seemed to Jaime that the long weeks he had lain in bed he had been asleep, even though his eyes were open. He had rarely gone to the Maidenvault before—Margaery Tyrell had been housed there, and he had no reason to pay calls on little roses; before that, it had gone largely unused. Now it felt familiar in comparison to the rubble of the Red Keep, yet unhaunted by the ghosts of his sister, his father, his children.

The Maidenvault had a little cloistered garden in which he liked to sit, well-wrapped with furs, when the snow stopped; he was there when Lord Bronn Blackwater of Highgarden came to see “if you’ve any strength at all left, pussy-cat.”

“My father would have your eyes for that,” Jaime said, conversationally. He did not get up. There was no need. Bronn might not be a friend, but if he was an enemy Jaime would know it; anyhow he had been paid, and handsomely, and could hardly hold anything against the Lannisters. 

“Your father got a crossbow bolt in his stomach from your own dear brother largely because of his intolerant attitude.” Bronn brought a bottle out from behind his back—a precious clear bottle, with a whole pear grown inside. “Now I didn’t really think you’d fight me. But you do owe me, my lord, that you do,” and he produced two delicate crystal glasses from a breast pocket and poured liquor for them both. It was slow and thick with cold, but even in the winter air Jaime could catch the summery scent of pears. They toasted, and drank, and Bronn poured again. “Imagine that: Lord of Highgarden, and it seems the Tyrells kept their cellars right full, even to the end, even when they’d left the city,” Bronn said, and drank his draught down. “Horse piss to the Mother’s finest pear brandy in the blink of an eye.”

Jaime blinked at  _ horse piss _ , but Bronn didn’t know anything about the Bloody Mummers, of course.

“You owe me, as I was saying,” Bronn continued, pouring himself another nip, “for your bedding.”

Jaime barked a laugh. “You paid Jaimei not to cut off my balls with her little dagger?”

“I made sure your lady wife wasn’t discommoded any,” he said, nodding sagely. “Could’ve been much worse, without me. And to my thinking, you owe me some information, as a result.”

“Some...information.”

“Details, you see.”

Now  _ that _ was funny—much funnier than anything to do with Jaime’s cousin. He laughed for real this time, until his sides hurt. “You think I  _ fucked _ her?”

“I know you fucked her,” Bronn said, “she’s up the duff, en’t she?”

This was such a good point that Jaime had to laugh again, and raise his brandy-glass to Bronn. “My lord,” he said, with pointed courtesy, “if my lady wife wanted anything like that from me, I’d know. The last sentence she said to me on our wedding-night was to declare that she ‘wouldn’t be a woman.’”

Bronn snorted. “She’s a woman all right,” he said. “I’ve never seen a woman yet who grew a cock just because she put on a pair o’ hose.”

“That was what I said,” Jaime replied, then thought,  _ gods, am I talking about my  _ love life _ with  _ Bronn _?  _

“Well,” Bronn said, flipping a dagger out of his boot and beginning to pare his nails (the pear brandy long gone), “you didn’t ask my advice, but you’d better start as you mean to go on. If you want to fuck her, fuck her. If you don’t, let me know and I’ll take care of it for you.”

Jaime found himself truly incapable of speech, and yet—somehow—felt as though Bronn had hit on something profound.

Or perhaps just crude. Sometimes, when one had drunk too much brandy, it was hard to tell the difference.

* * *

 

“I still do not see why brothels are necessary,” Brienne said, irritated. “I understand that men are pigs—no woman understands it better. Yet we needn’t  _ indulge _ their piggishness.”

“But what will the whores do, my lady?” Tyrion asked, his voice a little ironical. “Shall they take up a new trade?”

“Surely they can sew and wash and clean,” Brienne said, but even as she spoke she knew the argument was foolish. She could never be a whore herself; she had not the gifts. Would anyone suggest that a poor girl, made as beautiful as Brienne had been made strong, ought to waste her gifts on drudging? No—that would be quite as unfair as to insist that Brienne not wield a sword. And she would not be good at sewing or washing or cleaning either; it was not at all the same thing as caring for armor, for tack. 

She frowned, and stared out at the ruins of the harbor district. A ship had come in—rare enough in these times, though there were more each day, as word passed round Westeros and Essos that King’s Landing was desperate for trade. Those riding at anchor were mostly brigs and brigantines, with a few Essosi junques; the fishing smacks were out for the day. The new ship, by comparison, was a barquentine, four-masted and majestic and—Brienne blinked— _ flagged to Tarth _ .

“Father,” she breathed, and ran.

She did not find him on the ship, of course, but only later, at the Red Keep, in the Maidenvault. She found him in her rooms, her and Jaime’s rooms, and startled them—they were sitting there examining each other, each in a chair next to the fireplace—and Father stood and she embraced him with tears in her eyes. “I  _ worried _ ,” she told him, “I worried that Tarth had been overrun…!”

“Tarth is well,” he said, “except the lost trade from the wars. And you, gods! I knew they’d see what you were worth someday!” He tousled her hair, like he had when she was only a little girl, and smiled so wide his face was like to crack. His voice was booming as it ever had been. “The Lion of Lannister! Well, and I have been telling him—my little girl!—he’s got himself the best wife in Westeros!”

Brienne felt herself pink with pleasure, but beneath the pleasure was a frisson of—what? It could not be shame. Finally, finally, she had done it right. She was not second-best any more: no one could say that. She had proven herself a swordsman, and a captain and leader of men. Then, for a victory lap, she had wedded the golden prince from the storybooks, and had promised to present him with an heir upon the instant, the greatest gift a woman could give her lord. She had proven herself in her own way and then in the way of the world. 

_ I’ve fought many battles, _ she wanted to say.  _ I’ve killed the dead. I’ve a Valyrian steel blade, now, father, and I’m a knight, just as you were and your father was. _ But instead she simply said, “I had hoped you might come in time for the wedding.”

He laughed broadly. “Certes you did, to prove me wrong as publicly as you can, eh? Sweet Brienne, always so stubborn. Well, I will admit it graciously: I was wrong. I thought no one would see you as I do. I thought Ser Humfrey was the best you could hope for. I’m not afraid to say it now‚ how could I be? For you’ve proven me wrong and beat me hollow. I could not be happier!”

Brienne’s father held her at arms length, examining her features.  _ He wonders if I have grown more beautiful, _ she thought.  _ I’ve only grown more ugly, and my handsome husband sets me off to no advantage.  _ At the thought she glanced to Jaime, and realized that he was frowning.

“Your daughter is a knight herself now,” he said. “She needs nothing from me; I hope you do not think all her success rests on having married a broken man from a broken house.”

“Oh—oh, no, not broken, never broken!” he laughed. He was always laughing, Brienne’s father: he always had laughed. It had been a great consolation to her that he was never angry, through any of her betrothals, but always found some way to be jolly, as hard as it might seem. He had laughed at Red Ronnet’s rose (and then had apologized, and petted her and made much of her, and given her a new shield) and had laughed when she beat Ser Humfrey (and then sent her out on her way; if she preferred to be a knight than to be a lady, she must make her way sleeping beneath hedges as all unpledged knights and fighting men did). But this laugh was different, unforced. It was a  _ delighted _ laugh. “No one will ever say the Lannisters are broken! Not when you hold Casterly Rock and your brother is Hand of the King!”

“Ser Brienne has been much with my brother of late,” Jaime said. “I have no head for ruling, but Tyrion says she promises to be a just lord.”

“A just lady,” Lord Selwyn said.

Brienne realized then that she loved Jaime a little—not for acting as though she were beautiful (though he had, often enough, at Winterfell) or for loyalty past the point of reason (she would always know that he had chosen Cersei first, at the last) but for saying “lord.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The first chapters of this story just flowed out of me in a fever...then life happened. But I know where the story's going and I suspect there's maybe five more chapters in it. I'll keep posting as I finish each, rather than trying to do it all in one go. I'd guess you'll get a (short) chapter every few days from here on in.


End file.
